Radeon Mobility 9700 hangs on FreeBSD

[Eddie Leisure]

Pedro Azevedo wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I installed FreeBSD, and PC-BSD as well, and when I try starting X the
> screen just goes black and the CPU usage increases a lot, I can't use any
> keys, I tried ctrl+alt+f1 but the screen remained black, I had to power down
> the computer to get it to reboot.
> I tried this on FreeBSD 7.x and 8.x and the results were the same. However
> on Linux there were no problems. (Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandriva,
> CentOS)
> I tried getting some help on Freenode, and someone told me the problem could
> be FreeBSD's DRM implementation and directed me to this mailling list for a
> possible solution.
> I realize this isn't the most extensive bug report, but I wasn't able to get
> a Xorg.log, still if you can help it's appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Pedro Azevedo
If this is a new install, also sure to add hald_enable="YES" to 
/etc/rc.conf as x uses hal to detect your hardware.

Something that might be useful here to see whats going on is to launch X 
using:
X -verbose -probeonly

This will show you what hardware/drivers and screen modes it's 
detecting.  It'll also show you problems if it has any.
Also, you want to make sure you have a compatible video driver is 
installed.  'vesa' usually works, but barely.  Check out 
/usr/ports/x11-drivers/xf86-video-* - if you know what your hardware is, 
it should be simple to figure out what driver you need.

Not sure how helpful this would be as it seems like PC-BSD should 
already have hal enabled and the more common drivers already available.  
At least this is a place to start.

Eddie